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Chocs away as usual suspects get back to business

January 16, 2012 in Columns, Football, Merk, Sport | View Comments

MANY of us this week may have at last broken a self-imposed winter training ban of our own after an extended Christmas period.

I personally spent more of December in a tin of Roses than my running shoes. I broke sweat once around the 27th when I fell asleep in front of the fire during Back to the Future II.

In the busy lead up to Christmas, the couple of games of six-a-side football in which I star fell by the wayside as a calendar full of office nights out and last-minute gift shopping got in the way of my weekly trot out (you should see the Opta Pro Zone stats: on average — three nutmegs conceded, two twisted ankles, one banished ball, lots of intemperate swearing).

Some may have slipped back into the spandex before this first full week back at work. I’m vaguely aware of people who swim outdoors on Christmas morning and others who fill the downtime before New Year’s with runs along the coastline or walks up hillsides.

Eoin Cadogan tweeted a picture on Christmas Day of himself and Cork teammates Sean Óg Ó hAilpín and Donal Óg Cusack at an unnamed hurling alley behind a veil of sweat and satisfied smiles. I threw a few more sausages under the grill and convinced myself it was a JBM photoshop job for Cody’s benefit.

But this week, the cobwebs were blown off throughout Ireland as those of us who pay to play under floodlights after work pulled up outside the cages once again. And as I pulled on damp, unwashed bibs that have sat in the back of a Volkswagen Golf for the break, I thought, it takes all types to make a team.

The Pointer 

Let me introduce this interesting chap. Though his AUL medals are perhaps now slightly tainted by the years, he’s still got it ‘upstairs’. Despite a certain thickening under the retro jersey, he can still strike a ball and head it even further.

His defining characteristic, apart from limited interest in a warm-up routine, however, is ‘the point’. A genius — he reckons — at positioning, he stands in the centre circle and indicates with a flourish of his index finger where exactly he wants the ball (to feet) and if he has the ball (at feet) he points to where he wants those around him to run. Every team needs one.

The Unknown Quantity, # 1 

On nights when both Sullivan twins have work, and the usual lads who can be relied upon to turn up when selected aren’t answering the phone, door or Facebook, you may be faced with an unfamiliar opponent across the halfway line before kick off.

He immediately picks up the ball from the tip-off, puts it through your planted feet and smashes the ball into the jumper in which you stashed your watch in the back of the net.

“Who brought your man?” you ask.

The Unknown Quantity, # 2 

It’s the Tuesday after a long weekend and bodies are thin on the ground. The twins are back on the night shift. We need a new lad. This time you’re joined in the bibs with someone who’s a friend of someone else. From the kick-off you pass to him, he takes a first touch that’s heavier than a black hole and then hops the ball off the bonnet of your car — via your face.

“Jesus, who brought your man?” you ask.

The Zoolander 

We’ve all seen Ben Stiller’s movie Zoolander, right? It’s the tale of a dim-witted but good natured male model. Incidentally, he can’t turn left. Like many of us on the five-a-side pitch.

The Self-Flagellating monk 

It may sound like an exotic cocktail in a men-only nightclub but it is in fact a well known archetype on all-weather pitches. This poor chap takes every sliced shot and mishit clearance like another terrible slip into mortal sin. He’ll shank the ball over the opponents’ defence, the surrounding high wall and into a nearby stream. Then, slapping his forehead and looking to the dark skies he’ll scream loud obscenities which shatter the relative calm in the area.

Flocks of birds clatter out of adjacent trees and bell towers. Sleeping children are later awoken from their sleep when he realises he left the lights on in the car the whole time.

The Skipper 

The man with the plan. He brings the bibs. Rings around every week making sure everyone’s still coming. When, invariably, everyone isn’t coming he chases up replacements. He knows the man who looks after the pitch by name and threatens to buy a respirator out of the kitty one day. Often he is the worst player on the pitch.

The Hacker 

He may not win the game… but you’re going home knowing you played on the same pitch as him tonight. Often wears a Féile 1992 T-shirt paired with O’Neill’s shorts and working shoes an old house-mate left behind when he emigrated to Western Australia.

The Fantasista 

One who can play a bit. And knows it. He calls every nutmeg. Celebrates every goal like he’s Marco Tardelli in the World Cup final. Wears snoods and tights. Claims to have had trials with Cork City but fell out with the manager because he wouldn’t pass to Kevin Doyle.

* adrianjrussell@gmail.com                                      Twitter: @adrianrussell

This column first appeared in the Irish Examiner newspaper

Frank’s tale throws legend into new focus

January 11, 2012 in Columns, Football, Sport | View Comments

FOR me Frank O’Farrell was a sad, grey face sketched in 25-year-old newspaper print.

As a young lad brainwashed by an uncle with a season ticket for the Stretford End before Ryanair brought it closer to home, my brother and I were swaddled in United red – despite the unease of a Leeds United supporting father.

We pored over books and books on the Munich Air Disaster, Cup wins, and league titles won. Names and places like Best, Wembley ’68, McGrath, Whiteside and Robson became familiar.

Before the days when you could buy flash replica jerseys and official club merchandise in every sports shop on every high street in the land, I was given an Aberdeen jersey (they were good at the time) and told, in my innocence, it was a Manchester United shirt.

Neighbours still remind me of that one, quarter of a century on.

Once, home for a family funeral, my uncle ducked out of the pub in Blackpool on Cork city’s northside, to get us a parcel of match programmes from Old Trafford as well as a heap of dusty homemade scrap books from the ‘60s 1970s.

The chunky News of the World headlines told tales of names like McIlroy, McQueen, Strachan and Stapleton.  It was great.

At that funeral, we could have walked for three minutes up the road and hit upon the homeplace of one of those featured in those pages of course.

Frank O’Farrell was born and reared on Dublin Hill, on the other side of the railway bridge, many will know from journeys ending in Kent Station. He watched the carriages rattle by daily and dreamed of one day driving the engine.

Instead his talent as a footballer saw his life on a different track altogether. And one which I did not appreciate until RTÉ aired a wonderful, Christmas treat of a documentary about the man last week.

‘The Shadow of Busby’  framed a tall, soft-spoken man now well into his golden years.. who remains the only Irishman to manage the famous club, Manchester United.

It unwrapped a wonderful secret history of Old Trafford’s backrooms and dark corridors – but like the best history lessons, it was weighed down with contemporary relevance.

The short version is this: O’Farrell played with Cork United until 1947 before he was tempted across to the bright lights of East London to play for West Ham. Far from indulging in the city’s excesses, such as they were, the devout Catholic lad joined the Salvation Army and attended mass daily.

In a familiar twist, injury brought the curtain down on a good career. Someone comfortable as leader, he took the reigns as manager at Torquay and after tasting promotion, took a bigger job at Leicester.

He became the first Irishman to lead out a team in the FA Cup final when he took Leicester to within one stride of the 39 steps.  He was denied by Manchester City.

Twelve months previously on the same patch of grass, Matt Busby had realised his quest to win the European Cup as Best, Charlton, Law et al beat Benfica under the Twin Towers. That should have been the final bar of Busby’s song.

Instead he ‘moved upstairs’ –as was the euphemism – and Wilf Mcguinness was installed as the boss. In fact there was no moving anywhere – Busby remained behind his desk in his office. McGuinness was gone less than a year later.

That summer of ‘69, after a spell as caretaker, Busby sat at Farrell’s kitchen table offering him one of the biggest jobs in football.

Tellingly, he told O’Farrell that he would be on a yearly salary of £12,000 – an old man now, Farrell has no problem remembering the figure. This one sticks in the craw.

Later when the pair –as well as Louis Edwards were sealing the deal – the chairman let slip that the salary he sanctioned was in fact £15k. He should have slapped Busby’s hand away then rather shake it then.

Ultimately, O’Farrell was shafted – you know that. But this testimony put meat on the bones of what is a forgotten Old Trafford tale. For me, reading those books from England all those years ago, Farrell was a failure – a forgotten footnote in the club’s long history. It’s an unfair telling of his tale. And though quietly spoken, he could obviously look after himself on the pitch and off it – and this programme showed him pulling no punches. Even when tilting at United’s idols.

O’Farrell talked of trying to curb the drinking of George Best, he labelled, with some understatement, club legend and English football great Bobby Charlton ‘a bit of a moaner’, and settled scores, calmly and matter-of-factly, with Busby himself.

The Scot had the ear of senior players like Charlton and Law as they went on regular golf outings together. Busby still refused to vacate his manager’s chair and his shadow loomed large.

Now, the shadows are lengthening for the 84-year-old Farrell. He sits in his garden in Torquay, surrounded by family and happy to have been at the top – if not for such a fleeting time.

“I was manager of Manchester United,” he says in a familiar accent. “they can’t take that away from me.”

Alex Ferguson, whomever comes after him, and those ‘upstairs’ in the boardroom at the Theatre of Dreams would do well not to forget the their history.

Still flicking to kick….

January 11, 2012 in Columns, Football, Sport | View Comments

 

First appeared in the Irish Examiner on December 23, 2011

ON Sunday morning, many of us will be woken by electronic bleeps and whirrs as new computer-powered gadgets and toys are plugged in, charged up and used for the first time.

But in a world unmarked by Xboxes, the analogue sounds of Christmases past, soundtracked December 25.

Think Meccano pieces clicking, bike wheels turning or – if you were lucky – plastic footballer figures clacking against a disproportionally large ball.

“So, you’re the man exploring the underbelly of Irish table football,” says national champion Mark Farrell as he picks up the phone in Dublin, having been warned I was to call.

I imagine he’s wearing a crown and sitting on a throne with a branded green felt pitch at his feet after his latest All-Ireland victory.

The 33-year-old is at the centre of a ‘resurgence’ in the game in recent years. He and like-minded individuals gather in parish halls, community centres, each others homes every week.

They roll out the pitch, set up the goals and flick-to-kick as the famous slogan went.

“The majority of the players these days would be guys who remember the game from their youth and they’ve probably grown up with the game. There’s a quantity of junior players still but the vast majority would be in their 20s and 30s.

“These fellas remember the game from their youth – these fellas with XBoxes and Playstations are growing up with those games. They don’t really have an affiliation with table football, you know, and its harder for them to get into it.

“I started playing about 20 years ago when I was about 12 or 13. And it was a big association then. The 90s would have been the heyday then around the game Europe. I played for about five or six years and then I stopped, went  off to college and everything else became more important.

“And then I came back to it when I turned about 30. Like a lot of guys.”

John Moore is one of the reasons the game is on the up again despite the fact that – to paraphrase the late Apple chief Steve Jobs – there’s probably an app for that.

“I started playing when I was about eight years of age, he says. “I encouraged all the friends to play as well, we would have leagues, cups, World Cups and play the old Division One in England with transfers, suspensions, sending offs, injuries.  It was the first version of [computer game] Championship Manager I suppose.

“I had received email a couple of years ago and decided to enter a team in the world cup in Birmingham.  That’s where it all started off again.  Since that tournament , Irish players have travelled to about 10 countries playing in about 40 competitions in the last eight years.”

You might remember punk band Half Man Half Biscuit and their hit song: All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit. It conveyed brilliantly the longing felt by Subbutteo enthusiasts for the extensive collection of paraphernalia that came hand-in-hand with enjoying the game.

“Ah yeah, that used to be a huge thing and that’s what got kids into it years ago,” says Farrell.
“You wanted to have the Liverpool or the Man U side but truthfully nowadays the supplier Waddingtons don’t make it anymore.

“The stuff isn’t available anymore in the high street – you used to be able to buy every little item – from replica World Cups trophies, the goals, advertising hoarding – every nook and cranny. But nowadays it’s mostly Ebay, there’s a lot of sellers out there and you buy teams and start from scratch and build up from there.”

Both table football exponents admit their hobby – (quick fact: Subbutteo comes from the Latin word for hobby) – leaves them open to a ‘slagging’.

“That’s the thing. At time you did get a bit of a slagging and they hear you’re playing table football and they’re like : ah sure that’s a kids’ game, what are you doing still playing that? But I think when people check out the website and they see what’s involved, their eyes are opened.

“When they see you’ve won a national title or whatever, they take you a little bit more seriously and realise there’s a bit of structure to it. We’re just not blokes in our 20s and 30s flicking a ball around a table.”

Brought to book. The hard way

October 19, 2011 in Books, Columns, Hurling | View Comments

 

THEY say everyone has a book in them. Paddy Coyne dragged it out kicking and screaming.

Unemployment arrives at the door with plenty of baggage. Lots of us know it all too well these days. For the 35-year-old, Coyne, opportunity knocked too, however.

The north Tipperary man no longer filled his days on the floor at a factory. Instead he cracked open his laptop and wrote his first novel The Drinker with a Hurling Problem. When no-one would publish it, he did so himself.

The book, on the surface, is about someone who returns to the homeplace for one final lash at the junior title with the local club. It’s about a lot more besides, one suspects.

“I suppose I was trying to have a conversation with myself about why I played hurling and became so obsessive about it over the years,” Coyne — who played junior hurling, but ‘was never any good’ — tells me.

“It worked to an extent in that I got those feelings down on paper in a structured way. The story isn’t completely auto-biographical, but it certainly does reflect how I feel about hurling. An old axiom suggests that writers write about the one thing that bothers them so much they have no choice, but to write about it.

“One day I came across something that Maurice Mitchell had said in 1973 — ‘not enough young men and women arrived in university without ever having shipped a punch in the nose’. That really struck a chord with me and got me thinking about writing a book about the GAA. In Ireland now we have this excruciating problem whereby every man and his family seem to be run like a private company.

“Our sense of community is being diluted. And, I think the GAA matters more now because the old certainties of rural life no longer hold. That, I suppose, is the point I was trying to get across, that the GAA can still help a man to find a sense of himself.”

Having read the opening pages however this is no Fáilte Ireland, soft-focus clip through an idealised rural Ireland. Put it this way, if it’s ever adapted into a movie, Cillian Murphy rather than James Nesbitt will play the lead.

It’s a long way from the silver screen now admittedly. Coyne, the sound of slamming doors ringing still in his ears, took a punt and published it.

“I sent off a draft of the book to several mainstream publishers and was, as I expected to be honest, roundly rejected. I then turned my attention to self-publishing. I wrote the book for myself, as an exercise in self therapy if you like, so I was never banking on making a lot of money off it. But since I had written the damn thing I reckoned that I should try to make people aware of its existence.

“Self-publishing is easy enough and free which is always nice. With Amazon you can quite easily piece together a physical book and an eBook. It’s ridiculously easy to be honest. Once you have that accomplished the idea is to market it. I have not made much progress with that, but am hopeful that a couple of reviews, whether good or bad, might help it to get some traction in the market.”

And though the market may be crowded, Coyne — who devours sports book obsessively — isn’t impressed with those present. That perceived lack of quality in sports writing, on this side of the Atlantic particularly, prompted him to add another spine to a tower of books.

“I suppose I have been frustrated with the sports books I have read over the past few years. None have really come close to capturing what it is like for someone to play with a less than glamorous hurling team or with any hurling team for that matter. I don’t know if I have managed to capture it in the book, but at least I have given it a go. Some GAA books are fairly insulting efforts. A child could do a better job with a crayon.”

So now the cruel world can judge his effort too. Though he may not be in the parish if and when his tale of local rivalry and universal themes finds its audience.

“I’m not sure what I am going to do with myself now,” he answers when I enquire to his situation.

“Emigration is an obvious option. Personally, I don’t think I’m good enough a writer to make a living out of it, but I really enjoyed writing the book and might try something more mainstream next time round.”

* You can buy the eBook (€2.99) or a physical copy (€9.99). Both can be ordered off Amazon.com, search for ‘The Drinker with the Hurling Problem’.

* Email: adrian@thescore.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

This column first apepared in the Irish Examiner ion October 14.

July 13, 2011 in Athletics, Columns, Golf, Sport | View Comments

 

“LEGS, arms, eyebrows, chest hair, nipples, inner thigh, everything. And I mean everything. I raised €2,500 that night but they took every bit of hair off me with the waxing,” says Ross Long as he thinks back on that night in the Gaelic Bar.

The Carrigaline local organised a quiz night in the pub and a waxing charity drive so he could get himself on the place to the Special Olympics in Athens.  He also had the Kieran Kramer band entertain the locals, the Corner House in the city’s Coburg St opened their doors and Lifiemi Mafi donated a Munster jersey to raffle. Friends rallied, favours were called in and the €3,750 that every Special Olympics volunteer needs to table was boxed off.

Thousands of miles away, a 14-year-old Chinese athlete was making less painful preparations for his trip to the Greek capital. And Jun Sung, turned out to be quite happy that Long left the Gaelic Bar without a whisper of body hair – and his fund-raising problems sorted.

“I went out and was paired up with a Chinese golfer,” says Long 24 hours after touching down in Dublin with a campaign which say Team Ireland take 107 medals in total behind him.

“It was extremely frustrating at the beginning because of the language barrier.  He was a good golfer – I could see that – but he needed a lot of encouraging and his concentration wasn’t good.”

With the Chinese lad seemingly not too adept with Long’s lilting Leeside accent and the caddy knowing little Cantonese, he didn’t get much encouragement on their first day out together on the greens. He shot a very disappointing 71.

“He just needed someone to talk him through it,” continues Long.  “So we went back in and I was thinking ‘how am I going to help this fella now?’

“So I went up to his coach who spoke a bit of English and said ‘I need Jun Sung – his name was Jun Sung – to be able to understand me’.

“I have one of these phones with a voice recorder in it and I got the coach to say about 10 phrases into the machine.”

There, off the course, the three stood as they muddled through a series of phrases that Long thought would be helpful.

“Please concentrate Jun Sung.”

“The lie of the putt is left.”

 

“The lie of the putt is right.”

“Your choice of club is wrong.”

“You need extra power because of the sand.”

The pair headed out the next day with a small hole punched through the language barrier.

“He shot 59 and picked up 11 shots,” says the Corkman, “then the third day he hit 51 and the last was 60.”“What can I say, I came up with an ingenious plan and helped him out,” the caddy deadpans.

“We definitely bonded. We were high-fiving all the way around the course; that was my way of telling him that he had hit a good shot. So if he made a mistake or whatever and I held back the high five, the head would drop.

“Then on the next hole if he did better he’d give me a thumbs up and we’d have a high-five. He was only 14 and he only had two words in English: ‘water’ and ‘okay’.

“[But] I went out there and was paired with a Chinese golfer who I never met and by the end there was of course an emotional attachment.  On the last day I gave him a Team Ireland T-shirt with Athens 2011 on it and our logo and he gave me a little Chinese doll that someone must have given to him to give to me.  I don’t where he got it from.

The performance earned the youngster a bronze medal.  The Chinese coaches were jumping around behind the rope as they tried to explain to the athlete what he’d achieved, despite a terrible start.

“There was definitely a few hugs at the end,” he adds.

So Leeside can take some credit for a Chinese medal. Did Long go to see its presentation?

“We all went to the awards ceremony to support the Irish athletes but obviously when athletes from other countries got their medals we’d cheer and clap them too. But when Sung got his medal he got an extra cheer from the Irish,” he recalls.

The luggage is unpacked again and the trip for this volunteer is a tan, some wonderful memories and a little Chinese doll. Was the waxing worth it to get there?

“When you wake up the next morning with no hair but you’re fundraising is done it’s worth it. Fellas were coming up saying ‘I’ll give you fifty for half an eye-brow’.

“And I was like: give me it. I’m delighted I got there.”

You get the feeling, he’s not the only one.Adrian@thescore.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

Going down in family history

July 5, 2011 in Columns, Cycling, Football, Sport | View Comments

LET’S talk a little cycling and football. But first some family history.

William O’Doherty pulled on his apron as normal one morning in Cork city and walked to work behind the bar of the well-known Woodford Bourne public house on St Patrick’s Street. The year was 1912.

He was in his early 20s and, it seems, liked a game of cards after his shift pouring pints. One night he and a colleague were dealt a fateful hand. The pot? A ticket each for the Titanic’s maiden voyage.

You can, I’m sure, guess the rest; both young men were lost in the cold water on that night to remember, April 15.

It sounds like a Hollywood yarn – and indeed it is, thanks to James Cameron – but O’Doherty was my grandfather’s uncle. And, sadly we thought, he earned even less than those Irish who were resigned to the footnotes in that chapter of history. O’Doherty and his workmate were forgotten completely – the names of the two lads who actually lost the game of cards, and earlier booked the tickets, are instead on records, plaques and in books.

They may well have cursed their luck at the full table in that dark corner of the bar (which is still open), then risen and walked out into rich, full and long lives. Their descendents may be reading this now. But their names are inked in history’s ledger as the two young men who frozen in the Atlantic.

So, prompted by an uncle who compiled our family tree through hours of research and conversation, I stayed back late one night after work in the Irish Examiner offices and sneezed my way through the dusty archives. A colleague in the library allowed me to literally reel in the years on the impressive microfilm print machine. I poured a coffee and slotted the spool marked ‘Cork Examiner, 1912’ into the mechanism.

Eventually I found the front page for which I was looking. Peering back at me through layers of time and several generations was the stoic image of a posing William ‘Achilles’ O’Doherty. With a middle name like that, he was always doomed, it seemed to me.

The journalist Senan Maloney dedicated a section of his book ‘The Irish Aboard the Titanic’, to the pair’s story having one day rapped on my grandmother’s front door, I believe.

Armed with these pieces of evidence, we next contacted the heritage centre in Cobh, to politely pull at their sleeve and explain that their list of lost souls on the wall was missing a couple of chancers. They promised a year ago to commemorate him by producing a piece of the wall of his own.

Tomorrow, meanwhile, the Tour de France gets underway and its stages will, I hope, be once again bookended by the voice of Eurosport’s Gary Imlach. The wry, intelligent presenter has been doing the presenting job for years, prodding studio guests like Stephen Roche for nuggets of information that those of us outside the peloton never learned.

He wintered this year under the lights of Channel 4’s graveyard NFL coverage in which his understated demeanour seemed at odds with the chuckling persona of his America in-studio pundit.

But far from saddles and shoulder pads, it’s from another sporting tradition that Imlach’s family is rooted. When his father died in 2001, the Englishman realised he knew relatively little about him. He wrote a wonderful book – My Father and Other Working Class Football Heroes – as a sort of testimonial.

Stewart Imlach – Gary’s father – was a left winger from Lossiemouth in Scotland. A nippy winger, he weaved his way through 14 seasons of professional football, over 400 games, including playing in the 1959 FA Cup Final for Nottingham Forest against Luton Town and the 1958 Scottish World Cup.

He rarely spoke of his past and Gary didn’t delve into his father’s career until he was forced to rely on secondary sources – like newspaper microfilm – for sources.

“The list of his clubs had always had a natural rise and fall to it,” he wrote, “Bury, Derby, Nottingham Forest – pause for a beat – Luton, Coventry, Crystal Palace. Nine syllables up, nine down.”

And the sad end to a proud career becomes more personal as he learns more. “I knew the sequence of steps to and from the high-altitude plateau in the middle of his career, but I didn’t know the tempo. Discovering the abruptness of his decline was like coming across an old spool of cine film in the attic that showed him falling silently and inexplicably downstairs.”
Finding a match programme for the ’58 Wembley showpiece, Imlach reads with a little sadness: “Bob McKinlay, centre-half: training to be a motor mechanic … Stewart Imlach, outside-left: a return to the joinery business.” His father did quickly fade into the shadows again and folded away his medals and caps. But his son’s memorial is a wonderful piece of writing and a better testimonial to his dad.

On Sunday, rather than sit in and watch the second stage of Le Tour with Imlach, after an email from Cobh this week, we hope to travel to the town for the day to view William O’Doherty’s new testimonial for the first time.

Adrian@thescore.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

Be careful what you tweet for

June 14, 2011 in Columns, Sport | View Comments

THEY say you shouldn’t write anything online you wouldn’t like to see on the front page of the New York Times the next morning.

MJ Tierney has a media degree and though he didn’t see his one-word tweet emblazoned across the famous broad sheets of the ‘Gray Old Lady’ on Monday morning, he will certainly have learned a few more lessons about how this industry works in the past seven days.

The talented Laois senior footballer was dropped from the county’s starting XV as the side prepared to face Dublin in Croke Park on Sunday afternoon.

The summer was hard underfoot, the Hill was blue and the television on-air studio light was red. This is the reason why a talented young lad like Tierney went to bed early, ate what he was told, lifted what was put at his feet in the gym throughout the fog of winter training. When he was dropped – late in the day it seems – he had every right to feel disillusioned.

When he sent a tweet and updated his Facebook page with that very word however, he broke new ground.

The bullet that killed Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 was the shot that launched the world into World War I and ultimately modernity.   Will this seemingly innocuous tweet, fired out absent-mindedly by an upset footballer, do the same for the GAA? As Pat Shortt once said, “One bullet; Bang, bang.”

The Association is, if not rocked, at least a little rattled by the imposition of this technology it seems.  Column inches were devoted to the issue, the Sunday Game discussed it after Des Cahill read out the succinct message and Tierney was compelled to defend himself off-line.

Tony Davis and Kevin McStay ran the usual route of a lot of those in the media – in Ireland and beyond – of playing the I-don’t-get-it card. They’d want to start trying to and not revel in any perceived Old School superiority. Maybe things were better back in the day, in many respects, but those times are not coming back.  I have a hunch: this internet thing isn’t going away.

“There are ways of taking bad news or tough medicine on the chin,” said the former Mayo star McStay on the Montrose couch.

“I would suggest that tweeting to the GAA public is not one of them. It doesn’t show a lot in the sense of teamwork or what you’re about,” he added.

John Fogarty of this parish reported that Tierney was unhappy with the spotlight afforded by RTE’s flagship GAA programme: “Why bother bringing it up?” Tierney argued, “They were making something out of nothing. It says more about the quality of The Sunday Game that they have to talk about a tweet by me. That’s the stupidest part of it. Obviously, they haven’t much to be talking about and that’s the truth of it.”

Like cash-strapped fans picking their battles this year though – Tierney should’ve realised he was fighting a losing one there. He wrote something publicly – you can’t complain when people comment on it.

GAA chiefs met to discuss Twitter this week we’re told – though theyve already furnished players with guidelines. On Wednesday night, Tierney, admirably fought his corner against similar opposition on RTE’s Committee Room (which is really good by the way). He sounded pretty sensible to me.

Marty Morrissey and Vincent Hogan however made reference to a more sinister thread of online discourse: anonymous chat rooms. Earlier in the day, Down’s John Clarke threw his hat at his intercounty career, citing pressure and criticism. Let there be no mistake that those in the shadows who belch anonymous vitriol onto the internet every Monday morning and beyond add considerably to that which is upon an intercounty player.

For all the light that modern communications bring to our lives – think Google Earth, texting a loved one, a picture message when you meet a hero – there’s darkness too. The internet seems to add a layer of distance to conversation, seemingly giving licence for bad manners or worse.

It often reminds me of those shouting obscenities through a windscreen at fellow drivers in traffic. Put those commuters on a crowded footpath and they  don’t as easily swear abuse however.

Honestly, at this stage of my life if someone offered me a magical capsule which would transform me into an intercounty player instantly, I think I’d refuse. Why would I want to sacrifice freedom, privacy, time and energy for what the modern player expects in return?

The prospect of a hip replacement, a strained personal life and servers full of online abuse.

Tierney, tellingly, alluded casually to the amateur status that is the foundation of the association. Or as he put it when asked if he hadn’t learned the lessons of English soccer stars like Giggs and Rooney: “They get paid for it, that’s the difference”.

It certainly is. Though as Daily Mirror reporter Oli Holt learned when he opened his twitter account this week, Rio Ferdinand – a man who is paid handsomely – should also realise what you write online, will end up in the public domain.

“You fat prick. U got something to say about me missing a drugs test say it when u see me,” the Manchester United man  had written to Holt in a private Twitter message.  The Mirror put it on their front page.

 

Adrian@thescore.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

 

Camán everybody: Bringing hurling to the Oval Office

June 8, 2011 in Columns, GAA | View Comments

WHEN Barack Obama stood on the front lawn of Áras an hUachtarán on Monday morning, holding a hurley in his golfer’s grip and swinging it from the elbows like he was warming up in a batting cage, we all knew how he had come to be there.

We’ve all read the stories of his young life in Hawaii and Indonesia. We learned of his nascent political career on the spit-and-sawdust Chicago political shop floor.

We saw him win an election and take an oath and duck through the door of Marine One onto the Phoenix Park grass.

On Monday morning, he smiled as he took the unfamiliar stick in his hands, stepped towards the already-charmed press pack and half-joked of ‘paddling’ members of the United States Congress with this Irish ash if they ever stepped out of line again. We knew how he’d reached that point.

But how did the hurley get there? Phil Archibold put it there.

Let’s rewind a little. The Dubliner was working in the post and print room of stockbroking firm in the capital. But he – bravely- jacked it in and set himself an another road, one leading towards dual passions: sport and history.

“I’m a tour guide at Croke Park now and when they rang there looking for something to give the president on his visit, I think someone out them on to us.

Archbold is someone who bookends phone messages with a ‘dia duit’ and a ‘slán’. After two years leading tours through ghosts in Kilmainham Jail, you suspect he knows why its important still to do so.

When he moved across the river to Croker he fell in love with the small ball code.

“I only found hurling in the past few years. I grew up in the Coolock -Darndale area, we would’ve been lads in the late 1970s and 80s. You know, it was a working class area of Dublin, and generally there wasn’t too much hurling around.

“I was always a football or soccer fan and followed it for years but I’m all about the hurling now. I came in one day and said it to the lads – I can’t go on following everything so it’s just hurling now,” he adds. Case closed, Heffo.

Archbold and his wife noticed a gap in the market sometime later and Heritage Hurleys was born.

“We have a small gift shop and there was no real hurling gift out there, we realised. It’s such a unique thing – hurling – it’s our own 2,000 year-old sport and people love learning about it when they’re here let me tell you.

“Myself and the wife whenever we get the chance are off in the car and we’re down the country and we saw there too that none of the gift shops have anything really to do with hurling.  So i looked around the web myself and there was a a few guys customising hurleys but we wanted to move it on a bit.  We put in our own money and made up a couple of samples and got things going ourselves.”

The hurleys are souvenirs – he pitches them to me as perfect for weddings, club awards, tourists, whatever – with customised images or crest. It seems like one of those Post-It notes ideas; why didn’t anyone else think of that?

“It’s going slow at the moment – it’s tough trying to do everything and hold down a job. I could do so much more but who can afford to jack in the job?

Some weekends, I might get in the car and use up a load of petrol some days and get them out there a bit more – and no one has not taken one when they see them – but there’s a lot of work in it. But we have the website up and running now and hopefully this will make a difference.

“We couldn’t get any investment, the bank wouldn’t even give us an overdraft.  But hopefully it’ll move on a bit now.”

All the hurleys are those with bad grain and this was one of John Torpeys from Clare. Archibold imprinted the Celtic symbols of “circles of eternity” from the Newgrange stone on the shaft.

An inscription reads: “Presented to Barack Obama, President of the United States of America, on the occasion of his first visit to Ireland, May 2011 by An Taoiseach Enda Kenny T.D.”

And if one of you products is kept under the Roosevelt desk in the Oval Office – your marketing budget isn’t so much of a worry any more.

How’d you manage that one?

“The taoiseach’s office was looking for something for a nice gift for the president. And there was a lack of gifts out there really that relates to hurling – same as we found – so i think someone suggested they contact us.

“I watched it on Monday morning. It was a very proud moment really. I don’t think I realised beforehand how much of a big deal it would be.

“It was like any other customer – I wanted to get it right .  But that hurley is part of history now. It was a very proud moment.”

Adrian@thescore.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

  • Visit HeritageHurleys for more

 

Fleet street hell raiser lived a life as dramatic as the stories he wrote

May 30, 2011 in Columns, Sport, Writing | View Comments

IF Fleet Street was still filled with the sound of clacking typewriter keys and the industrial whirr of print-rooms, they would have fell silent this week for a moment.

That ink-smudged world is long gone of course and this week another wonderful anachronism was lost to the newspaper world.

Peter Batt was an East End boy of Irish extraction who laid down a shovel in a 1970s building site for the last time, blagged his way onto a newsroom floor and made a name for himself: Peter the Poet.

In the most vivid of colourful lives he would develop a famous alcohol problem that would ultimately scar his life, go through jobs quicker than ring notebooks and write the first episodes of a TV a series that became Eastenders – before losing that job too.

When his former colleagues, friends and family fill the pews of the church in Molton on Monday week for Batt’s funeral, a former workmate will offer the eulogy.

I interrupt Norman Giller, who is working on his 89th book when I ring him this week. A London journalism legend in his own right, ‘Uncle Norman’ – as he signs an email to me – reported an countless top-flight English football games, proudly compiled the celebrated annual Times Sports Jumbo Crossword for ‘27 consecutive years’ and wrote the scripts on This is Your Life for over a decade.

If anyone’s going to deliver an oration at your graveside, it might as well be the man who filled Michael Aspel’s famous red book.

“Peter won’t mind me telling you about all this,” he says generously, “he loved being known as a character.”And he was.

“Everybody has a Peter Batt story,” Giller continues. “the difference being that I was there as a disbelieving eyewitness. I first came across him when I was a copyboy on the [now defunct] London Evening News in the mid-1950s. One of the copytakers used to berate the reporters with: ‘Is there much more of this f****** crap …?” Meet ‘Batty’.

Giller says his friend literally couldn’t utter a sentence without a ribbon of obscenities. ‘But he got away with it’.

“His reputation arrived ahead of him, and Peter did not disappoint us with his behaviour,” he remembers, “Once around then Peter was late for the umpteenth time, he was called into an editor’s office for a final yellow card warning. He proceeded to explain that he had been to hospital because ‘I cut me old John Thomas while with a bird last night’.”

The editor and those watching through the glass panes from the floor outside were agog when Batt dropped his trousers as evidence. End of argument.

The pair’s paths crossed again in London’s swinging sixties.

“I was sitting subbing on the Daily Herald sports desk when, waving to me with a huge grin, was none other than Batty.” When a plane crashed in the Pysenees the new reporter was dispatched.

“He got to the foothills in an inebriated condition, and when the taxi-driver dropped him as close as possible to the scene of the crash, he managed to fall over in the snow while attempting to walk up the mountain.

“Rescuers coming down from the wrecked plane found him, picked him up and carried him to a nearby convent where he was put into bed and nursed by nuns, who did not help his condition by giving him copious shots of brandy to warm him up. Word got back to other reporters covering the story that a survivor had been found. They dashed to the convent to discover a pissed-as-a-pudding Batty sitting up in bed toasting their arrival, saying: “Thought I’d died and woken up in ‘eaven.”

By now crippled by drink (though Giller says Batty couldn’t get going without one) he made a name for himself as a wonderful sports writer. Colleagues said his balletic turn of phrase was testament to his Irish blood.

He needed the poetic licence when filing expenses claims as well as columns.

While working at The Sun, Batt charged for a hospitality meal with racing trainer Vincent O’Brien. An accountant noticed that the receipt that was pinned to his expenses sheet was for four people, including two children’s meals. When the sports editor queried him, Batt ad-libbed: ’Well, boss, Vincent turned up with two jockeys and they were both making weight, so I ordered from the kids menu’.”

Giller says his old friend was estranged from his long-suffering, German-born wife Heidi of 30 years when she at last grew weary of his alcohol-sparked mood swings. He eventually, thankfully, clambered aboard the wagon and was reunited with his family – including now some grandkids – before his death aged 77 in recent days.

His old sportsdesk colleague said that friends from the old beat tried to help him with his drink problem but failed everytime. They eventually decided to stop socialising with him as ‘socialising meant drinking’ to Batt. They’ll have one in his absence one more time however.

Giller recalled this week many episodes of a career riding shotgun with Batt which could fill a best-seller.
But Uncle Norman laughs quietly down the phone at the recollection of one night out many years ago: World cup hero Geoff Hurst’s testimonial dinner.

“Peter was a Dean Martin soundalike who and the memory is clear in my head of him falling blind drunk off the stage at at the London Hilton while singing “My Way”.

“He got as far as ‘And now the end is near…”

“He bashed his head on landing and had no recollection of it happening.” The police were called and the night ended in a brawl.

Yes, he did it his way.

Adrian@thescore.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

Putting the Dan plan into practice

May 4, 2011 in Columns, Golf | View Comments

SOMETIMES you wake up with a bright idea and just go with it.

Usually however, a half-baked notion doesn’t require you to quit your job, empty your bank account and play golf for 30 hours a week, for the next six years.

Meet Dan McLaughlin. The 30-year-old is currently 12 months into a programme he calls The Dan Plan. You’re gonna like this guy.

On April 5, 2010, he packed away his camera, quit his job as commercial photographer and walked out of the dark room into the light.

So began what they might call in his trendy, left-leaning hometown of Portland: ‘a journey’.

McLaughlin (he says he’s a mix of Irish and Scottish but possibly some Welsh too) bought a set of clubs, headed for the nearest public course and clocked hour one in a what he hopes will be a 10,000 hour trek to the pros. The complete novice has set himself the goal of winning a PGA Tour card by the end of the 30-hour per week process.

The 10k hour mark is not one he plucked from his golf bag. The writer Malcolm Gladwell — we’ve spoken about him here before — has made the theory somewhat famous. The New Yorker magazine journalist quotes the young Beatles honing their craft in Hamburg, Beethoven writing middling symphonies as a kid, young Europeans landing in downtown Manhattan with years of practical business experience tucked in their back pocket and ultimately retiring to a penthouse in midtown years later.

But Gladwell is merely the prism with which many of us first viewed the theory that applies to sport so powerfully. The man who first shone a light on it was the impressively-titled Dr K Anders Ericsson. He’s the professor of Psychology at Florida State University.

“Elite performers engage in ‘deliberate practice’ — an effort-ful activity designed to improve target performance,” he wrote with an academic’s love of jargon. But strip it away and he could have been thinking about Joe Canning volleying a sliotar off a gable-end wall, David Beckham curling football after football over a cardboard silhouette wall or Tiger Woods pitching buckets of Titleists as the sun dipped on another day.

When Dan explained the laughably ambitious goal he’d set himself — to become a PGA pro, having never held a putter — Ericsson said with a smile: “I think you’re the right astronaut for this mission.”

He sure sounds it when he picks up the phone to me this week, having just come in from his morning session.

“It’s an experiment to test how far you can go purely with hard work,” he says in explanation. “It’s a way to tell whether the idea of talent exists. For me I really wanted to see how much potential was in one average person. And I do see myself as an average person.”

For the record, he says he has no previous experience as a competitive athlete, nor is he in “particularly good physical condition”.

McLaughlin comes in under average height and weight, had never played a full 18 holes of golf before this idea occurred to him, and had only been to a driving range a handful of times. Lefty or righty? He didn’t know that either.

“What I wanted to do was put all my energies into the 10,000 hours into one field and see how far we can go,” he continues. “And I wanted to do it in my 30s because most of the research is in people who train from 10 to 20 or whatever. So it’s during the teenage years and the brain, we know, is developing and it’s somewhat easier to learn and absorb.”

But why pick golf? Isn’t there easier ways to make a point?

“For a number of reasons. One was pretty basic: being outdoors is very appealing to me. I spent plenty of time working inside and wanted something outside. I also wanted to do something that was basically nearly impossible. There’s a chance of success but it’s minute. There’s only a couple of hundred PGA tour cards in the world.

“If I had chosen to be a doctor or an architect it would still be a real challenge and a feat but there’s thousands of them. Its not quite as compelling as something where there’s a really really slim chance of it working out.”

Logging in 30-plus hours a week, he will hit the 10,000 hour milestone by November 2015 he reckons. At that stage the Dan Plan stipulates he will win amateur events and obtain his PGA Tour card.

“Judging by the progress of the time I put in over the past year, its gonna take six years but at the same time I only putted in the first five months. So I think the time will be a greater from here on.”

Time flies when you’re having fun: McLaughlin says he’s falling ‘more and more in love with the game every week”. We agree to meet up at the Ryder Cup in a half a dozen years or so; though he’s working harder than I to get into the press room. I put down the phone and promise myself I’ll swing a club myself this weekend.

* Keep track on his progress at

- Contact: adrian@thescore.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Friday, April 22, 2011

Cheltenham: a mug’s game

March 21, 2011 in Columns, Horses | View Comments

I HAD a good day at Cheltenham yesterday – but sitting in pair of tracksuit pants and a hoodie with the laptop open on a bookmaker’s website, made the experience a lonelier one.

The same way you often have to fix your sights on a platform vending machine to know if your train is actually moving, I think I needed to dance for joy on a carpet of beaten dockets next to those whose emotions where in contrast to mine.

Alas – and this isn’t the worst set-up in the world – the money just kept trickling into my sportsbook account with little fanfare. And though it kept coming, it was like interest on the Holy Communion money I converted to Sammy Squirrel Saver Stamps all those years ago.

I started the day – aptly I thought – with Wishful Thinking. This year – you may be aware – the sports editor has pulled the purse strings yet tighter. Where 12 months ago I wasted €50 of the newspaper’s money, this year a more modest total of €20 would be mine to piddle away.

I had a good scan of the various tipsters, Twitter and the Examiner. Two of the faces on Irish gamblings’ Mount Rushmore – Pat Keane and Today FM’s John Duggan – were turned towards the Richard Johnson-steered mount. That was good enough for me.

I threw on €2 each way – big spender, ladies – and he trotted in second behind Tony McCoy. I can’t complain, though €4.69 dropping into your account doesn’t quite set you up for a run on Paddy Power. But as Ted Walsh said at one stage yesterday: there’s plenty of horse in this one yet.

So at 2.05pm, with the Pertemps Final, it was a Ruby Thursday for me. I’m not one for a bromance or male adulation but I wandered in town last night with a fake shiner eye and a jockey’s helmet. I lost my whip though.
Sivota came in third I think, earning me €9.75 on a €3 each way bet. Slowly, slowly, catchy monkey.

And then to the Ryanair Chase. Colm Murray, admitting it was a bit of “Duirt bean liom go nduirt bean lei” let it be known on RTE that Ruby was bigging up the chances of Poquelin to punters. ‘Not for me, Jeff’ as they say on Soccer Saturday.
I threw my considerable financial clout behind Kalahari King: €2 each way netting me the life-changing sum of €5.56.

Then to the big one. Here, there was much to ponder. Big Buck’s was a miserly evens – and you, readers, deserve more bang for your buck than me betting on evens.

As the ever-quotable Ted Walsh said of the anxious Paul Nicholls-trained horse: “he’s a box-walker”. I was walking my box too as I pondered the next move. Ultimately after a well-timed email from an Examiner collegeue who is the Rain Man of National Hunt racing, I went for Mourad, who was under Paul Townend. A €4 each way bet ultimately earned us a €9 return. Vegas, baby.

And so the 4pm. This one was easy – there was always Neil Diamond records in our house growing up. And come to think of it, there was always a Davy Russell there too. So Beautiful Sound, ridden by my brother’s namesake was the obvious choice. A fiver to place saw me pocket a cheeky €11.25. Not bad.

By the final run out, I was hoping an actual win would be the cherry on an afternoon that saw me pick six places from the first half a dozen races.

Like Tony Soprano, Junior was the one I went too. And what a run. €4 each way pocketed a nifty, afternoon-high €24.67. From little acorns do mighty oaks grow and I’ll be back with a fresh €20 note to take on the house again. And this time I’m going to get dressed and walk to the bookies.

Profit: €44.92

This column first appeared in the Irish Examiner on March 18, 2011.

O’Donoghue’s Living Golf and the dream

March 7, 2011 in Columns, Golf, Politics | View Comments

WHEN Tiger Woods trudged off the course at Augusta last year, having made a disappointing comeback to the game that put his name in lights, one of the first faces he saw framed under the peak of his swoosh-emblazoned cap was an Irishman.

Shane O’Donoghue has been here many times before through the years with RTÉ and then the BBC. He offered the mic to the most notorious man this side of Tripoli or Charlie Sheen… and threw him a soft ball.

“You have two – maybe three questions if you’re lucky,” he explained to me this week, “so you’re going to have to throw them a relative soft ball with the first one to essentially engage them.

“And then with the second question, hopefully you’ll get some insight into what happened out there. There’s not a lot of wriggle room really.”

No, this isn’t Hangin’ with Hector. With millions watching, maybe 100 words in your bag and 120 seconds to swing them at an unhappy pro, there is little room for the aforementioned wriggle. As Tiger pursed his lips, O’Donoghue followed up the introductory query with something a little meatier.

Tiger wasn’t in the mood to answer yet more questions after a 20-week break from the game in which he dodged them. He paid cursory tribute to his old rival and winner Phil Mickelson and moved out from under O’Donoghue’s shadow. End of transmission.

The best golfer in the world came to stand in that spot, in that corner of Georgia, through a lifetime of practice, coaching from an obsessive father from a young age, good fortune, hard work, no little talent and some foolish decisions. But how did the Clonmel man come to share that little piece of American real estate at that moment?

Well, if it started for Eldrick on the dusty public golf courses of Orange County in California, for O’Donoghue the first steps are traced to Clonmel golf course and perhaps caddying for his mother at Cork Scratch Senior Cups below in Fota. But it’s the same game, wherever you start.

From playing junior against the likes of Padraig Harrington, he went on to covering the likes of Graeme McDowell in amateur championships. He graduated to walking inside the ropes at Irish Opens for RTÉ to jetting off to the States for the BBC’s majors coverage. And now the Tipperary native has shaved yet more off his game. Meet the new face of CNN’s golf coverage.

“It’s a dream come true really,” he says. “It’s a magnificent opportunity for me. I had seven seasons at the BBC and that was a boyhood dream realised too, to be honest. And I was quite committed to carrying that on. But then out of the blue this came up and it’s just a dream.”

Like any travelling professional that kicks off the shoes at the end of the hotel bed, loosens the tie and clicks on the telly, he took in his share of CNN – and often caught their golf magazine show: Living Golf. He’s now its new host as well as the station’s main golf anchor.

“I was aware of the programme like everyone who travels abroad. It’s a magazine show really and like anyone I’d think, ‘how did your man get that job’?

“It’s a very well rounded show, it gets behind the scenes and zones in on where the decisions are made. It’s a lifestyle and magazine show essentially but golf is at its core.” He pauses for a beat. “And not only that but CNN asked me to present their entire golf coverage!”

It’s obvious, he still can’t believe his luck. But, like the cliché rings, he made his own.

“I was always building towards this since I started in Clonmel. It all started to come together when I was around 30; I realised I had all this broadcasting experience and I should be using it to cover my passion,” he says. “So I started to ruthlessly pursue it – I cold-called the BBC and made tapes which I sent off. I’ve always had to chase the dream – this is the first time that the dream came after me.”

As we speak, O’Donoghue is gearing up for a six-week stint Stateside, which will culminate in him hosting the station’s coverage from Augusta. He might well be reunited with Tiger – now number four in the world, but it won’t be their first meeting since last year. Recently the pair sat down for a 20-minute chat for the new show. As well as the customary gentle first question, O’Donoghue had the scope to offer a few curve balls. So what’s he like?

“On a personal level he was very professional and courteous. I’m quite pleased with how it went but there’s always room for improvement. It was my first real in-depth chat with him and hopefully it’ll be the start of a relationship there.

“Because really he’s the focus of attention at the moment, in that the question is: can he get back to winnings ways? I firmly believe he can and he reckons it’s just a matter of getting into the winners’ enclosure once again and the rest will look after itself. I think that’s right.”

* O’Donoghue’s book about Ireland’s greatest amateur golfers, Legends in their Spare Time, has been republished.

Contact: Adrian@thescore.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Friday, March 04, 2011

No tree too big to fell as O’Leary ready for showtime

March 7, 2011 in Columns, GAA | View Comments

MORE INNOCENT times. On the day Fianna Fáil launched its 2002 election campaign, PJ Mara walked into the party’s press conference in the Shelbourne Hotel and announced: “It’s showtime.”

Last Saturday, as a general election campaign swirled at our door, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, I thought the same while Croke Park hunkered down under the bright lights. Earlier, as the bulbs warmed over Dublin’s biggest stage, I met a man who boasts the scars of many a campaign of his own.

For someone who earns his living swinging high amongst the branches with a saw, one imagines, clamped between his teeth, you’d expect Noel O’Leary to know where The Big Tree is. The Dublin watering hole is one station on the pilgrimage to Croker for many GAA supporters in the summertime. He must have rolled past the Dorset St pub behind a coach window on countless occasions though the seasons with Cork’s football panels.

You don’t win All-Irelands by looking out the window at the lads in the pub though, I suppose.

I knew how to get there. As a student in a college up the road in my day and a one-time resident of Drumcondra, the last time I was over the threshold of the bar I was hanging from the rafters in a retro jersey on a Wednesday night ‘County Colours’ night. Last Saturday, however, I was part of a Special Olympics panel discussion with John Fogarty of this parish and The Star’s Peter Sweeney. (As someone said at the time, I do (ITALICS PLEASE) like talking about my charity work).

A couple of hundred feet away, Dublin were beating the All-Ireland hurling champions under a carpet of cotton-wool fog. Jedward were/was clearing their throat beneath the Hogan Stand in preparation for their Croker debut and over our shoulders on TV screens, Crawley Town impressed at Old Trafford.

In this corner of the capital though, we were to talk football ahead of the Rebels’ clash with the Dubs.

The star was the Cork footballer amongst us. The Kilnamartyra man was present only because he had been sent off the previous Sunday in Tralee. Red is Noel O’Leary’s colour.
And like Superman’s kryptonite, the green-and-gold awakens something inside him. He left the Kingdom with two points and another ban after an off-the-ball tussle with Barry John Keane.

Despite never darkening the door of the Big Tree before, the tree surgeon found his way into the bar and listened intently from the audience with a couple of friends from home. It keeps a journalist honest when one of the association’s toughest customers is peering over the lip of a jar at you as you waffle about the merits of swarm defence or whatever. One suspects he can spot a spoofer.

Eventually the emcee Marcus O Buachalla of Pembroke Communications asks O’Leary to join the panel. He doesn’t want to, naturally enough but peels himself off the high stool, and plonks in next to the panelists.

First query: ‘Paul Galvin: friend or foe?’

“That’s a very unfair question,” a lady in the front row offers from her seat, “That’s a very unfair question,” she repeats.
O’Leary has his arms folded and his head dropped into the mic with a wry, bashful smile across his face. Okay we’ll move on. His supporter in the crowd smiles and winks.

Last year ahead of the All-Ireland football final with Down the Cork County Board produced pen pics of the squad members with neat biographies and interesting tidits. One of the questions – what’s your favourite piece of technology – drew predictable responses from the players. Most appreciated the iPod, the Sky-plus hard-drive or the smart phone. I’d be bereft without any of the three for more than a 15-minute period to be quite honest. One player answered differently: my chainsaw.

The arborist’s work-day would take a lot longer to digest without the teeth of a chainsaw. But no one heard its distinctive brrrr-brrrr-brrrrr in the Big Tree last weekend.

O’Leary spoke quietly and intelligently. And the cartoon hard man played the politician’s role as well as any on your ballot paper today. He sprinkled praise on former team-mates and coaches – Billy to Tompkins to Counihan. Weighed the prospects of every serious football county carefully and betrayed none of the animosity that surely fuels his relationship with his near neighbours across the border in Kerry.

As the Sam Maguire sat in the foreground on a pedestal 10 feet away, he concluded quietly: “There’s a lot done, more to do.” Or to use another Fianna Fáil catchcall from yesteryear: Showtime!

Adrian@thescore.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

This column first appeared in the print version of the Irish Examiner – a couple of weeks ago, forgot to post.

Spreading the good word in sunny Seville

February 23, 2011 in Columns, GAA, Sport | View Comments

LIKE A LOT of the best ideas, it is first talked about over the load music and a couple of drinks.

Kevin Lenane stood in the usual spot in the The Merchant — an Irish pub in the centre of Seville. Just around the corner the busy bus station is shuttling tired professionals home for the night after a run-of-the-mill Tuesday in the city. Inside the city’s most popular Irish bar however, it’s St Patrick’s Day, 2009. And grand plans are hatched.

Lenane puts his drink on the bar, leans in to make himself heard above The Pogues and broaches a subject that’s been on his mind, with half of a dozen of his fellow ex-pats.

“I had this thing in my mind for a few years — setting up a GAA club — but there was never the numbers there,” Lenane says, when I call him at his desk this week. “There was always the older guys but we didn’t think we’d have enough to field a team.”

Then St Patrick oiled the wheels. “We were having a pint — probably having too many pints, if I’m honest — and we got talking about it again. There was seven or eight of us and we said we’d give it a go and surely we’d pick up a few more along the way.”

Some 125 years after Cusack and the lads sank a few at the founding of the Association in Liberty Square, Thurles, the Éire Óg Seville club was formed on Calle de Canalegas, Sevilla.

The Waterford man — an accomplished footballer in his own right — has been in Spain for over a decade. It was nice to unpack a piece of home which he had long since left in a dressing room corner back home.

“I came out here 11 years ago — I chased a girl. That old story,” he says with an audible smile. “I met her in Cork — I was working as a telecommunications engineer and she was studying.

“So I decided to chance my arm out here and see if I could take to Spanish life. I started working in a bar because I had no Spanish. But I worked my way up and I’m now in an office job which is a completely different ball game. We got married a couple of years ago and we have a daughter now too so I’m well settled.”

There was a handful like him around in Andalusia; those who crammed under the big screen on Sundays for big matches beamed from home. They pulled on the O’Neill’s nicks and dusty studs once again.

“It was November by time we got out to train [after the Paddy’s Day summit] but there was only a few of us turning up — four or five — and we thought the club might fold before we even played a game. But after Christmas — miraculously — there was a few students turned up and guys who we didn’t even know existed in the area.”

‘Los verdirojos’ or the green-and-reds were born. A motley crew of Irish ex-pats, English friends, Scandinavians, scholars and locals tugged on the adopted colours. The club made their debut in the Spanish championship — yes, there is such a wonderful thing — last year. This Saturday they host the Iberian GAA championship.

Teams from Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Marbella, A Coruña and Pamplona will take part in the event which will be held in the shadow of Seville’s famous old Olympic Stadium. Referees will be jetted in from the old sod. Games are 11-a-side, and games last 20 minutes. It’s a serious business.

“We made our debut in the Spanish championship in Marbella in 2010 which was a massive achievement. How did we get on? Not too good, to be honest. If there was six teams in it, we probably came sixth,” says Lenane. But the only way is up. Last year they went to Madrid and only lost out to Valencia in the semi-final by a kick of a ball.

This year, on their own citrus-scented turf, they mean business.

“We have an even better team now, having been together a few years and have gotten to know each other and improved. But more than that, we have a handful of Spanish lads too which is great. They got involved because they either saw the posters we put around the place or watched the games in the bars with us or experienced the game when they were travelling.”

And as in La Liga’s duopoly, the big boys with the targets on their backs this weekend wear famous crests on their chests.

“The heavyweights would be Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia are coming along now too. Pamplona is made up of entirely Basques. It’s an amazing achievement. The standard? I played senior for Ardmore and minor for the county. And I’d say the standard would be Junior A, maybe, in general. But saying that, a Barcelona or Madrid would match up to a good senior club side, I’d say, no problem.”

Win, lose or draw, however, The Merchant Bar will heave afterwards. And more plans will be made. “The best thing about it is the social aspect,” concludes Lenane, “I’m out here over a decade now and it’s good to get out and reconnect with your roots. And it’s an excuse to get out for a jars. Which is a big plus at my stage.”

Contact: Adrian@thescore.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Friday, February 18, 2011

A long way from Killarney in May

February 15, 2011 in Aussie Rules, Columns, Sport | View Comments

TOMMY WALSH’S DEBUT in the AFL next week is a story that will be framed by the sports pages, distilled by short-sleeved press men and is, undeniably, about Aussie Rules.

But it’s about Aussie Rules footie the same way Citizen Kane is about sleds. There is much more to this one.

When the rookie-listed Kerryman – if that’s not a contradiction in terms – lopes onto the field under his hard-top of blonde hair alongside his senior St Kilda’s team mates for the first time on the biggest stage down under, it will almost be a journey as long as that between Fiji and Croke Park.

And this circuitous route corkscrewed through a couple of detours thanks to some pretty extraordinary diversions with which he was merely an innocent by-stander on the hard shoulder.

Walsh looks set to finally make his Aussie Rules debut next week, 15 months after being signed up by the Saints. The former Kerry football star has been named by coach Ross Lyon in the Saints squad for the league’s pre-season tournament, the NAB Cup. The Saints – who came out on the wrong side of a remarkable Grand Final series last season with Collingwood – are scheduled to take on Essendon and the Brisbane Lions when the round robin stage of the competition kicks off next week.

Walsh spent last season working with Sandringham, the team’s junior affiliate in the Victorian Football League, aware that it would take time to learn the ropes of a new sport before making the progression to the first team.

On one occasion in the months before the All-Ireland-winning footballer left the familiar streets of Tralee for the trendy downtown of Melbourne from Tralee, I sat down with him for chat. One stalk of the famous green and gold Twin Towers, Walsh peered down silently as he scraped the skies, from behind folded arms. He offered a few scant monosyllables and threw me scraps of half-chewed sentences.

I clicked off the Dictaphone and was about to, politely, throw my hat at what Tom Humphries called the ‘nanny goat mambo’. But I surreptitiously squeezed the record button again when, like two jailbirds searching for a tunnel in a dark prison yard, we stumbled across a shared interest. Basketball.

Walsh’s young face seemed to unfold itself to reveal the 20-odd-year old who was into something. I dug out the quotes on my lap-top just now: “Watching [Michael Jordan] really inspired me to get out here and practise and like all the young lads I was always decked out in the latest Air Jordan gear.

“He was no angel. No… but he had to be tough. He was the best there was and you don’t get there by not standing up for yourself.”

He was no angel. Walsh has shared an oval with a few more that fit that bill recently. Though that’s where the comparisons end with MJ in the Saints’ dressing room – and you don’t expect to find many cherubs among AFL’s best regardless.

Walsh has undoubtedly found himself on the locker room benches with the club’s big stars because he has spent months learning his new trade, honing new skills and taking the ‘snot-bubble’ hits they talk of in America’s NFL.

But he has also allowed himself to squeeze through the door because of others’ misbehaviour.

Captain Nick Riewoldt, Sam Gilbert, Zac Dawson, Rhys Stanley, Jack Steven and Paul Cahill have all been ruled out of next week’s games on the back of their respective involvement in a nude photo scandal and abuse of prescription medication during a pre-season training camp.

In the week leading up to Christmas, a teenage girl released compromising pictures of two players on Facebook. The players denied ever meeting the girl. She told a radio station she was pregnant. Claim and counter claim. It’s an awful story. The press called it Dikileaks.

And apart from being caught in the drawn-out, mucky photo saga, the skipper Riewoldt was also forced to apologise this week for another off-field incident.

A woman went on Melbourne radio to say Riewoldt swore at her for taking a photo of Saints players the day after they lost last year’s replayed grand final. Ricky Nixon – the so-called super-agent who lured Walsh and others across the equator – is also Riewoldt’s representative.
He too was accused of ‘bullying’ after he allegedly rang the woman.

But that’s not Walsh’s concern. He’ll be deployed at ‘full back and forward according to Lyon.

It’s a long way from Killarney in May. In more ways than one.

Adrianrussell@thescore.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

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